Essential vs SUMA vs Supermarkets

To help you see how things stack up I've done some virtual shopping, buying the same shopping basket from three suppliers; Tesco, SUMA, and Essential Wholefoods. Outer (bulk pack) sizes are in brackets, and where I've had to work out weight-equivalent prices I've put "eq."

Own Label Basket (all organic)
SUMA tomato soup (12x400g) 81p. Tesco £0.81, Essential (12) £0.81
SUMA cashews (6x125g) £1.09. Tesco eq. £1.57, Essential (12) £1.03
SUMA Long grain brown rice (6x500g) £0.70. Tesco £0.99, Essential (12) £0.64
SUMA Porridge oats (6x500g) £0.62. Tesco eq. £0.73, Essential (12) £0.63
SUMA Medium roast fairtrade coffee (6x227g) £2.24. Tesco eq. £3.83 (not fairtrade), Essential (6) £2.23

General Basket
Organic peanut butter SUMA (6x340g). £1.31. Tesco (Sunpat) eq. £1.78, Essential (6) £1.31
Green & Black's Maya Gold Chocolate (15x100g). SUMA £1.08, Tesco £1.48, Essential (15) £1.08
Organic tomato puree SUMA (12x200g). £0.52, Tesco (Biona) £0.79, Essential eq. £0.70
Organic honey SUMA (12x445g). £1.46, Tesco eq. £2.60, Essential eq £2.35
Marigold S Veg low-salt bouillon (12x150g). SUMA £1.31, Tesco £1.75, Essential (12) £1.31
Kallo thick organic rice cakes (12x130g). SUMA £0.62, Tesco £0.61, Essential (12) £0.77
Belvoir Elderflower Cordial (6x70cl). SUMA £2.23, Tesco £2.99, Essential (6) £1.94

These prices were prepared a year ago, but a quick look online in August 2008 shows that the trend remains the same. For organics, specialist diets and wholefoods, Tesco is a lot more expensive than our co-operative model. As far as prices go, there's not a strong difference between the two co-op wholesalers. Essential was offering better trading terms - a minimum order of £200 against SUMA's £375 - but this may be outweighed by their larger outer sizes for staple items. The need to share outers between members is likely to be the biggest limiting factor in how people use the co-operative, so we need to know the likely numbers before choosing a wholesaler.

Bunny juggling

A sad story, indeed. The Hedge has been under the weather this last week with a sinus infection (I'll spare you the snotty details), but planting has been carrying on apace; more of that in a while.



I've been sleeping poorly, though, and last night I was roused at 5am by the sound of Number One Cat apparently fighting with a deckchair. When he started yowling I realised it was Time To Deal With It, so I dragged my naked carcass into the utility room.

N1C was intently studying the space between a cardboard box and the wall. I'm well used to the occasional forced repatriation of Dorset rodentii and know the drill quite well, so one minute later I'm back in toe-protecting slippers and hand-protecting leather gloves but otherwise still ball-ock nack-ed, ready to scoop said shocked rodent up and eject it from the house (one way or the other). It was a bit of a surprise when I discovered that the rodent in question was a fair-sized rabbit, and I realised that I had no idea how to pick it up safely.

Enter WP, bleary-eyed and limp-tailed, and not a bit pleased at being woken up. "Oh for Christ's sake," she snapped, "Give me the fucking gloves." Once correctly clad, like a professional rabbit-wrangler she bent and scooped...

Except suddenly, it was no longer one rabbit she was holding, but about three. And for some reason, she seemed to be juggling with them. Each time round the rabbit would briefly connect with one gloved hand or other, but would kick a leg and be airborne once more. It was most impressive, and all I could do was gape.

WP growled at me* until I indicated the cat flap as a suitable receptacle for the Rabbit Probability Field, and out the little hopper went. Peace was restored, at least insofar as it could be at 5am, and we trundled off to bed again after barricading the cat flap to prevent a repeat performance.

The sad part was that this morning we were greeted by a very excited magpie in the garden, and investigation revealed that he was breakfasting on the remains of said rabbit so the cats must have found it again. Tomorrow when I'm a bit brighter I'll bury what's left in one of the runner bean planting holes, and the circle of life continues... (cue Elton John)


*Later translation of this sound revealed the message "Open the fucking door!"

It's Not Easy Being Green Competition

The BBC are running a competition to get a space on one of Dick Strawbridge's courses, and the BBC's own privacy policy means they don't use your e-mail address for anything else. What have you got to lose?

Water, water, everywhere...

When we floated the news that we were planning to put a polytunnel into our garden a couple of years ago, one of the objections raised by the Posh Neighbours was that it would use a lot of water. Now I have to say that I didn't give this objection the serious consideration that I might have done, largely because of the way that it was phrased; "...because with water pressure being so low it's hard enough to top up the swimming pool as it is." Hmmm.

Last year, however, I discovered that polytunnels do indeed dry out fairly quickly; ours is a 24' model and it took around thirty minutes each day to water it thoroughly. That's not an unpleasant way to wake up in the morning, but it was time that could have been better spent checking on the actual plants - and then there's the environmental aspect of all that water too, since most of it would just evaporate during the day. Even temporary dryness is disasterous in a polytunnel, since dehydrated plants are less able to tolerate the high temperatures. Scorch is almost instant.

This year I was determined not to do so much watering, so over the winter I made an irrigation plan for the working garden with Leaky Pipe for the tunnel, pumpkin patch and strawberry beds. For the uninitiated, this is a porous rubber pipe that "sweats" water slowly over its whole length - which has advantages over ordinary watering in that there is no run-off. It works best when buried a few inches under the soil surface (or under a mulch) because then there's less surface evaporation too. Best of all I rigged the tunnel up with some irrigation timers that I bought from Lidl for not a lot, so the whole thing handles itself just leaving me with a little feeding and spot-watering for more demanding customers.



To help with pots and trays on the bench, I happened to catch an end-of-line deal from Garden Organic last autumn and got a big sheet of capillary matting for half price. This carries water from a reservoir (read: upside down formula milk tin - I knew that would come in useful one day!) right across the mat to be sucked up by whatever's standing on it. Right now that's my seed trays, but later on in the season it'll be pots - and provided I top the reservoir up each morning, I'll only need to top water them every week or two to stop salts wicking to the surface and to administer feed. Bliss.

At £57 for a fifty metre kit, Leaky Pipe isn't cheap; but assuming a fairly modest 20 week warm period last year, I spent around 70 hours watering. Just watering. That makes £57 seem like a rather good investment!

Digger Day - no more!

Finally! I've finished the accursed (pronounced a-curse-ed for full effect) digging for this year. The asparagus bed is done, dug down to 12 inches and due to be topped up by a further five inches during planting and early growth. Since the soil is so very poor (and we're talking flints suspended in Victorian builders' rubble suspended in heavy clay subsoil) at that side of the garden, the bed makeup is fairly close to the makeup of this blog; fifty per cent crap (subsoil), forty per cent recycled material ("mulch" from the council) and ten per cent horse shit (er... horse shit).

Also done is the turning in of green manure in the raised beds, leaving them ready for the first round of planting tomorrow. I know, I know, I was supposed to dig in green manure a month ago to give it time to rot, but I was busy digging the new beds. I'd love to say that I have been waiting for the first quarter of the moon to do my seed planting, but in truth I'm simply behind (as usual) by a week or so. I'm not entirely sure where I stand on Moon Gardening, although I did have a bash at RJ Harris's book and found it pretty much impenetrable. I came away with the message "plant anything leafy when the moon is in the first quarter" but apart from that the only thing that really stuck is the author's hilarious quirk of always always referring to himself as "RJ Harris". I could quite imagine breakfast time in his house. "Good morning, RJ Harris." "Good morning, Mrs Harris." "Would you care for an egg this morning, RJ Harris?" etc.

The edible hedge seeds have been ordered this morning, and now I have to sit down and work out how much angle iron and wire I need to get hold of to make the fruit cage, having taken advice from Ian, HWD's resident engineer, on how strong it needs to be. More of that later, but I'll just mention that a local firm quoted me £437 to make a fruit cage - whereas I hope to do it for around £70.

Finally, a question. There's been a single sensation that drives me absolutely doolally. It's like fingernails on a chalk board, or knuckles popping, but this is a sensation rather than a sound - it's sand between my toes. I hate it. As a child I used to love being on the beach in summer, but I used to complain loudly as soon as I had to put on socks or shoes because... it... drives... me... mental!

So why, as an adult, do all of my non-wage-slave activities involve me putting stuff into - or taking stuff out of - the ground?

Showers forecast...

...but sadly, not the sort I was expecting. Let me explain.

Yesterday being Sunday, I decided to finish digging out the last sodding soil bed by taking a few hours to go detecting in a rather old Dorset village nearby. I hadn't done any research on these fields, but the village was already there in 1066 so I felt that in nine hundred and fifty years someone was bound to have dropped something. And I was right.


In a few hours I pulled out three bronze roman coins (sadly unrecognisable, a sad indication of what chemical fertilizers do to the soil) and a damaged roman silver, a couple of buckles, a musket ball, and a split hammered coin (from Scotland no less, an Alexander III silver penny from 1280-1286). Nothing of any large monetary value, but enough to convince me that the field's a good'un. As is the nature of detecting I'd left it a bit late going home, and my bladder was uncomfortably full.

Ah, I see you have an inkling of where this is going. Courage. It won't take long.

The weather had been threatening all day with cell after cell of cold, gusty air pushing half-hearted wintery showers through. I'd been ignoring it as best I could, resplendent in my über-nerd red kagoul and woolly hat, but there was no diguising the fact that it had got a bit gusty. Despite all this there were occasional pedestrians walking along the line of the hedge a few hundred feet away, so being the soul of discretion I moseyed along to the nearest hedge, which so happened to be up on a raised bank which cut across the flow of the wind.



What happened next should really be included in textbooks for students of aerodynamics. As I realise now, right at the base of the bank there was a very strong updraft, and in Hedgewizard's wind shadow there was a zone of negative pressure... the upshot of which was that I was suddenly enveloped in a fine mist which was backlit through the skeletal hedgerow in a manner that, frankly, would have made Ridley Scott clap his hands like a baby. So taken aback was I that I started to laugh, which made bladder control unthinkable and caused a pedestrian to stop and stare across the field at me. I hate to think exactly what he saw...

Needless to say, detecting for the day ceased as soon as I stopped feeling moist and even now HW's clothes are having their final rinse. At least something in the house is warm...

The Edible Hedge - part the final +1

Now that buds are forming on the hedge backbone, it's time to start thinking about the vegetable layer - the plants that will grow in the bottom of the hedge on each side. Because I don't intend to intervene much in the hedge's development I need to concentrate on perennials and self-seeding annuals, and at this stage I have to be careful not to overwhelm the backbone plants in their first year. Sticking to my own rule about useful plants in the working garden, everything on the south side must give a crop of some sort, although the north side of the hedge (bordering the lawn) can have a greater emphasis on flowers.

It's worth thinking at this stage about what's happening along the length of the beast*. At the tall end, both silverberry and sea buckthorn can fix their own nitrogen, and a certain amount of this will be available to nearby plants. At the shallow end of the hedge there's no such nitrogen laid on, so a plant that fixes it would boost overall performance. Another thing that might help the hedge generally would be a biodynamic accumulator - permaculture-speak for something with a decent tap root which will bring nutrients up from the subsoil.

Once again I'm going to apply a cost constraint of using a single supplier and buying seed only; I've chosen the Agroforestry Research Trust for this because they're very up front about pros and cons. And because I have to pre-order the remaining fruit trees from them, as they sell out fast in the autumn. Oh, and while I'm on the site I'll be looking for some seeds to provide low-growing ground cover for the "in-betweeny" parts of the garden, in case I get bored of grass.

Having been through the ART seed list, I've come up with a shortlist. At £1.66 per pack and with white clover already in my shed (I use it as a green manure in the veg beds) and a tray of wild strawberries sown last year, I can do the whole thing for £15 plus £1.50 postage - good news given that I have to find the money to make up the fruit cage!

Low-growing plants for this year:

Allium ursinum

(ramsons), a perennial shade-loving woodland plant forming dense carpets of garlic-flavoured foliage from early spring until midsummer. Excellent as a garlic substitute; flowers and bulbs are edible as well as the leaves - all being garlic flavoured.

Fragaria vesca

(wild strawberry), a semi-evergreen perennial plant which spreads and roots as it goes. Strawberries make a good component of a ground cover layer beneath or around other plants. Sun, or part shade.

Melissa officinalis

(lemon balm). The familiar perennial herb with lemon-scented leaves which are excellent as a flavouring in salads and teas. Planted thickly it is a useful ground cover plant (although it is susceptible to rust in some areas). It self-seeds readily and spreads quickly if allowed. A good mineral accumulator. Sun or partial shade.

Mentha piperita

(peppermint). The familiar hybrid mint used for flavouring, herb teas etc. A vigorous spreading perennial (that will need to be planted in an old bucket or something to stop it spreading too much) growing up to 90 cm (3 ft) high and forming a ground cover; likes sun or part shade and a moist soil.

Viola odorata

(sweet violet). A tiny evergreen perennial growing 20 cm (8”) high. The leaves, flower buds and flowers are all edible raw. A woodland floor plant which likes a moist soil and part or full shade.

Trifolium repens

(white clover). This little plant is very useful for me since once it's established it grows well, tolerates a lot of shade, and competes well enough to shade grass out but not so well you can't plant clumps of other things into it. The real benefit though is that it's a nitrogen-fixer, and it self-seeds. The flowers are nice in salads, as are the leaves and young seedpods (though they are less interesting). Semi-evergreen, at least in Dorset.

Taller or shrubby plants to add next year (but start in pots now):

Agastache foeniculum

(anise hyssop), a 3' perennial with edible flowers and leaves with a sweet, aniseed flavour. Needs sun.

Chaenomeles japonica

(japonica, dwarf quince). A small shrub, reaching 1m (3 ft) high and across. Bright orange flowers are followed by lots of fragrant yellow fruits 1½" (40 mm) across which have to be cooked, but add a lovely flavour to stewed apples and are handy for home-made mock mango chutney.

Arctostaphylos uva-ursi

(bearberry). A 30cm-high prostrate, spreading evergreen shrub. The pea-sized fruits are edible, while the leaves are used medicinally, in teas, for tanning and dyeing. Likes an acid soil and a position in sun or part shade.

Lavandula angustifolia

(lavender). A dwarf evergreen shrub from the Mediterranean region, growing to 60 cm (2 ft) high. The leaves and flowers can be used for flavouring and bees adore the plant. Likes a well-drained soil and sun.

Handy for elsewhere in the garden:

Limnanthes douglasii

(poached egg plant). An annual which self-seeds, forming carpets of foliage and very attractive yellow and white flowers which hoverflies and other beneficials love. A very good plant to sow near and around others which are susceptible to aphid attack. Makes a reasonable ground cover beneath bush fruit until the summer. Often continues to grow over mild winters and flowers in the spring.

Globe artichoke

- I actually think I have some seeds of this already, but have to check before I place this order.

*The Length of the Beast. Wouldn't that make a cracking movie title? Some years ago I was running a role-playing game for some friends and had them quest for a book of dark magic, which I wanted to give a suitably portentious title. I opted for "The Way of the Dead" and translated it with the full might of two years' worth of ill-remembered Latin in secondary school as the modulus necros. When revealed it didn't really have the effect I'd hoped for as Colin (a better scholar than I) simply raised one eyebrow and said "The length of the dead?" Oh well, semper in faecibus sumus, sole profundum variat**...

**I'm always in the shit, it's only the depth that varies.

<<<< previous Edible Hedge post

Happles

Title courtesy of Number Two Son. Actually he hasn't said "happle" for a while now, but I love the word so much I may have to keep it. It's a shame when babyish mispronunciations disappear, but he's nearly four now so I guess I'd better get used to it. Gone are the days of Weebliebix and Mrs Accident (Atkinson).*



We were fortunate enough to inherit three and a half mature happle trees when we bought the house. Unfortunately three of them were cookers in absolutely terrible condition, planted close together but on rootstocks that wanted to make them 25' tall, so that they crowded together like three american football players trying to hide in a laundry basket. Oh, and riddled with canker - I really don't want to apply that part to the american footballer simile as it might give me nightmares. The last tree was a crabbed and elderly dwarf**, leaning over at a comical angle to try to escape from the canopy of a massive flowering cherry; it was suspected to be an eating happle but this was never proven, as it never fruited. We cut down the fireblight-ridden cherry to give the happle a chance at some light and it promptly died, presumably from excitement. When Hollywood finally comes calling, that tree should please be played by Patricia Hayes. Regardless of who plays it in Hedgewizard's Garden: the Musical, one of my jobs this year is to dig the roots out so that I can replant the area with something not likely to be affected with replant disease.

My scrappy garden plan, prepared at the end of our "watching" year at the start of all this mayhem and fiddled with about every 45 minutes ever since, tells me that the lower end of the garden is intended to be mixed fruit orchard with perennials under; the basis of what permaculturists call a "forest garden". It's not a huge area and just over half of it overlaps with the chicken forage zone, but I can do quite a lot with it. I suspect some things will thrive on the phosphate and nitrate from the chickens but others will be CONSUMED UTTERLY (said in deep echoey cartoon bad-guy tones) by the chickens themselves. I'll go in to what I'm trying down there another time.

One rainy afternoon in autumn 2005 I played around with a ruler and my plan to see how many semi-dwarfing trees I could get away with in the orchard, and then did the same on the ground with a borrowed click-wheel and staggered off to the computer to order some... stuff. WP and I decided that happles were the most important thing to grow since they store very well, so we allowed five spaces for them and only two each for pears dwarf cherries. This was a bit of a wrench though (and even more so after several months of eating the finest pears you can imagine courtesy of Riverford), so I'll be watching for a chance to bung another one in if I can possibly manage it. Oh yes, and two very dwarfing cherries and a plum. WP was against the plum to start with having made herself so ill on scrumps as a child that she didn't know which end to suspend over the toilet, but a few superb specimens from a local Freecycler's garden have reminded her just how delicious fresh ripe plums can be.

So here are the dessert happles we ended up with, and the eating times. They're all on MM106 rootstocks for trees 12' high or thereabouts, as high as I can go with a step ladder. Taller trees just end up with me getting snowed on. Bigger trees would of course give more fruit, but having experienced just how heavily a standard happle can fruit I'm well aware that as far as self-sufficiency is concerned, standard happle = glut. I'd much rather grow more semi-dwarfing types and spread the fruiting times out, so...

George Cave is the earliest, ripening in late July but not storing well - I can imagine feasting on these heavily though, as the first really fresh happles for a while!
Early Windsor is a conventional early, ripening in August for use through to September.
Next comes Winter Gem picked in October for use through to December.
Now comes the cunning bit. I've chosen two storage happles, which are too tart to enjoy fresh from the tree; they sweeten up when stored (probably in boxes of straw) and are to be eked out through the winter. Isle of Wight Pippin is picked in late September but keeps until March, and Tommy Knight (not planted yet) is picked in October but stores until June.

The five happle trees straddle all the pollination groups and allegedly fruit in succession, so that by the time they are fully mature we should really only have a month or so without our own dessert happles, and fruit from the edible hedge and gooseberries will be there to fill that gap. A shame no-one thought to do all this ten years ago! Coupled with the fact that the single most important thing you can do in your garden is to plant more flowering trees or shrubs, what are you waiting for?



*After three weeks of trying, Mrs Atkinson now proudly bears the moniker "Mrs Ax-skin-son" which is about as close as we're going to get for now.

**I'd like to make it clear that this in no way refers to The Evil Roy***, who taught me chemistry in sixth form. No, not at all.

***For full effect the phrase "The Evil Roy" should be pronounced in the style of Riff-Raff as played by Richard O'Brien. If you don't know what I mean, get drunk and watch the Rocky Horror Show.

SUMA co-operative vs Supermarkets

I've had the time now to pootle about with the SUMA price list to see if it's worthwhile starting a food co-operative. To let you see how the prices stack up, I've prepared a shopping basket and priced it up from SUMA and also from our largest local supermarket. I've pitched SUMA's own-brand products against Tesco's own brand organics, and then did a wider basket where I just looked for things I needed to buy last week, going for the best deal I could find. Some of the products are available in cheaper bulk packs from SUMA, but to make it fair I've compared like with like. Outer sizes are in brackets, and where I've had to work out weight-equivalent prices I've put "eq." I should stress that these are the SUMA trade prices; if you were buying them from a shop there'd obviously be a markup of at least 30 per cent.

A dream of the future?

The results are broadly as I'd expected. With one or two exceptions (notably olive oil), the supermarket is more expensive than SUMA for organics and fairtrade items (sometimes a LOT more expensive) but cheaper for regular stuff. It was actually pretty hard to prepare the shopping baskets because although they're improving Tesco still keeps relatively few organic lines.

Own Label Basket
SUMA tomato soup (12x400g) 81p. Tesco £0.81
SUMA cashews (6x125g) £1.09. Tesco eq. £1.57
SUMA Long grain brown rice (6x500g) £0.70. Tesco £0.99
SUMA Porridge oats (6x500g) £0.62. Tesco eq. £0.73
SUMA Medium roast fairtrade coffee (6x227g) £2.24. Tesco eq. £3.83 (not fairtrade)
SUMA Extra-virgin olive oil (6x500ml) £3.49. Tesco eq. £2.68

General Basket
Organic peanut butter SUMA (6x340g). £1.31. Tesco (Sunpat) eq. £1.78
Green & Black's Maya Gold Chocolate (15x100g). SUMA £1.08, Tesco £1.48
Organic tomato puree SUMA (12x200g). £0.52, Tesco (Biona) £0.79
Organic honey SUMA (12x445g). £1.46, Tesco eq. £2.60
Marigold S Veg low-salt bouillon (12x150g). SUMA £1.31, Tesco £1.75
Kallo thick organic rice cakes (12x130g). SUMA £0.62, Tesco £0.61
Belvoir Elderflower Cordial (6x70cl). SUMA £2.23, Tesco £2.99

It's interesting to note that when I threw the restriction of sticking to own-label stuff out of the window - and after all, nobody shops like that - the supermarket really took a hammering. Depending on the model that we eventually use for the buying co-operative it may be necessary to charge 5% to cover costs, but it looks like there's a big enough price gap to make the whole thing feasible. More later!

Mythago Shed

Strange. I approached the garage several times during the day intending to make a start in there, but always ended up doing something else. The garage appears to bend time and space to defend itself, like Robert Holstock's Mythago Wood. By the way if you've never read it, do so... now. Make sure you read the original novel first, though!

Sheds, garages and mausoleums

Just a quickie, chaps, to let y'all know I'm not dead. I may have buggered up my understanding of my own diary, but I can still dig. Sadly. The second and third trenches are all done - four inches of pretty poor topsoil, eight inches of compacted clay, three inches of flints and clay and then you're into alluvial grit and more flint. Slows me down quite a bit, does that lot! Just Two more trenches to go to be ready for the asparagus when it turns up, hopefully within the next week or so.

Also on the menu today was round one of nettle control round the play equipment. Boy! I had no idea those brittle rhizomes go so far. No wonder they keep coming back! I'm all in favour of nettles generally - especially pureed with a decent veg stock and a sprig of lovage - but that's one patch I can do without. The shed has been cleared out too, prior to the arrival of George Lucas and his team for the new Indiana Jones movie, Hunt for the Lost Lawnmower. Honestly, I know the shed pretty well - the upper levels at least - and if they actually find the mower I'll eat Indie's hat. I hear Harry Ford is buffing up for the role - poor chap. You'd think they'd allow Indie to have run to fat a bit at his age.

Actually I have to admit that I had an ulterior motive for clearing out the shed, which is that I've lost a twin tap that is a vital component of my irrigation plan. Presumably it's in the Garage of All Evil, which is sort of like the Shed but extended through a forth dimension. A dimension full of crap like abandoned motorbikes, paint pots, half-unpacked boxes from our exile days, an ottoman I've been meaning to fix up for six years now... oh, you know the deal. Wish me luck.

TTD Food Co-operative

If you buy organic food, wholefoods or gluten-free foods at the supermarket, you're almost certainly paying too much. The supermarkets seem to see organic foods and specialist dietary items as a cash cow, placing higher markups on them than on regular foods. How would you feel about a discount of 25% or more?

By forming a food buying co-operative we'll be able to buy directly from manufacturers and wholesalers, saving money and reducing our reliance on big food retailers like Tesco. Initially we will trade with a wholesaler such as SUMA wholefoods, but once the scheme finds its feet we hope to make group purchases of produce from a variety of local producers.

The first meeting of the food co-operative will be on Thursday 11th September (2008, in case anyone notices the date on this re-worked article!) at the Colliton Club in Dorchester. Kick-off's at 7.30, and everything is up for grabs... including the name of the group. Make sure that this is useful for YOU - by coming along and being part of it from the start!

SUMA Wholefoods is a workers co-operative based in Elland near Halifax. SUMA produces a very pretty (but eco-friendly) catalogue every two months, which you are welcome to look at every time the group meets; their price list is available online as well. SUMA produce a large range of "own label" products, and the catalogue tells you clearly if they're F (fair-trade), O (organic) or G (gluten-free), S (contains added sugar), or V (suitable for vegans). SUMA also stocks eco-friendly household products and organically grown wines, beers and ciders - not usually featured in supermarkets.


Want to know why this might be a good idea? Take a look at a working co-operative, and read the next page in this article!

Don't you just love being in control?

I'm so tired of dealing with people who don't or can't do what you ask them to. I'm talking about builders and chippies and people like that of course, but now I have to extend my ire to people who try to rip me off. The latest addition to the List of Bile is my oil supplier. May I offer you a little advice? If your home is heated by oil, you need to read this.



No doubt you'll already have upgraded your insulation, turned your thermostat down and lagged your granny - that's lagged, HB - but you may have found that your bills haven't come down as much as might have been expected. There's a good reason for this. The price of crude oil has come down by about a third over the last couple of years (possibly not a good thing but that's another story), but heating oil suppliers have been very slow to reduce their own headline prices. We're with Watsons Petroleum, on a budget plan (allegedly to spread the costs out) with automatic topup; so far so good, but clued in by a recent article I studied my latest bill.

The price applicable shall be determined by the price set on the day of supply is says, in print no higher than an ant's kneecap. Wait a minute! In other words I can phone for a quote as often as I like, but they're still allowed to make it up as they go along? Time for a phone round, methinks. I've been charged 43.9p/litre. Ten minutes and three companies later, I have an offer of 28.9p/litre. What's been going on? I pick up the phone again. What's the price today, I ask. 44.5p/litre, comes the reply. This can't be right, I opine, and explain the prices I've been quoted from elsewhere. There's a pause, followed by a papery sound. I know that sound, because I've made it myself. It's the sound made by someone who's pretending to be looking for something - you just pick up a sheaf of papers and rustle it a bit, and then put it back. It's usually accompanied by sentiments like "I've got the report right here and it'll be with you first thing tomorrow", and it fools no-one.

It emerges that we are Good Customers, and that a Special Price of 28.5p/litre can suddenly be applied. And yes, it can be applied retrospectively to that last delivery. Remarkable how they've only just noticed that we're Good Customers, after robbing us blind for the last couple of years. The tone of the sales clerk is exactly that of a child caught with one hand in the cookie jar; much mumbling and staring at feet. She didn't want to be put in this situation, obviously, but it's fairly clear what's happened. Watsons, in common with many if not most fuel companies, has kept their prices at an artificially high level for their regular customers, on the assumption that most of them won't notice. Point it out to them and they stuff their hands into their pockets and mumble about competitive markets like guilty schoolboys. GAH!

The sales girl continues, and it's obvious some kind of secondary protocol has been activated. It transpires that there is a delivery charge for bringing the oil to us, but instead of showing it on the invoice Watsons have chosen to incorporate (read "hide") it in the price per litre. So that's why the "automatic topup" never lets our tank go below three-quarters full - they make money through their delivery charge too! Would be mind if they disable automatic topup and just ring them when we need oil? We would not. And would we mind co-ordinating our orders with any neighbours who order through them? We would not, but why were we not asked to do that in the first place?

Rant over. You have been warned! Team up with your neighbours to place less frequent, larger orders, and ring around. Now!

Steamed

One important lesson that I've learned about myself is that it is the nature of the Hedgewizard to get a bit obsessive about things, especially when they're new. Give me a new project that really catches my imagination and I'll withdraw into it, do it to death, and carry on long after anyone sensible would have called it a day. If I'm not doing I'm thinking about it, muttering under my breath and pacing with excitement; the old "kid with a new toy" syndrome.

Annoying as it must make me to live with sometimes, it can be quite useful when sticking power is required (as opposed to real stamina, of which I am woefully short). However, it can sometimes be a pain in the arse - as now. Y'see, there's a lot to do in the garden from now until high summer; beds to create, plants to get in, seeds to be sown, paths to lay, mulches to be done, yadda yadda yadda. I need to be boiling with enthusiasm for it because frankly determination will only take me so far.

I'm boiling with enthusiasm all right, but sadly it's not for gardening; it's for treasure-hunting. I recently stumbled on some old accounts of a village near one of my metal-detecting haunts, and discovered that there's a manorhouse missing. It dates from Henry VIII at least; it's still mentioned in 1830, having just been converted to a farmhouse; but on the 1891 survey maps it's gone. No mention of it. So where did it go? Burned down, dismantled for stone, or simply re-named? No-one seems to know. Cue aerial photography, OS maps etc, and 48 hours later I have a good idea where the manorhouse was. All I need now is permission to go and look for it, and there's an excellent chance of finding a bit of buried treasure. I'm so excited - but sadly, that won't get my fruit trees planted. I need to readjust my focus in a hurry!

I know my own brain fairly well on this score, and it's possible. What I need to do is set myself a target and a reward. I've got Saturday through to next Wednesday off because I have to use up holiday entitlement at work, so I'll make myself a deal. If I can order the remaining fruit trees, dig out at least two of the veg beds and connect up the irrigation for the polytunnel, then I can have a day off to go detecting. Add familial responsibilities into the equation and I reckon it's ambitious but doable; I just hope I don't get ratty with folks if I can't get on with it because of the weather...

Starting a Food Co-operative

Last weekend I had to give Number One Son my lecture on "sometimes you have to make things happen" (the five minute version rather than the full half-hour), so now would seem to be a good time to get off my fat arse and practise what I preach for a change.

Over the last decade or so, Britain's shops have been swallowed up by the supermarkets at a frightening speed; Tesco is the biggest, and it's showing no sign of slowing down. Five minutes walk from the house there's a field which is leased from the farmer by The Watercress Company, which supplies Tesco with a fair proportion of the salady things that you see sweating away under the lights, tucked into their plastic bags of nitrogen and smelling slightly of chlorine. I can't buy watercress direct from TWC; I can steal it, but that's another story. If I want to buy some I can always do a 16 mile round trip to the nearest supermarket, but the watercress I buy there will already have been chlorinated, nitrogen-packed and then carried in a refrigerated articulated lorry to one of the supermarket's distribution centres, only to be put in the delivery for the local store and driven back here. I'm not too happy about that. I'd like to buy it from the farmer, or maybe from the little shop in the village with it having gone no further than that. By and large, though, I can't do this because the retail market is so dominated by the supermarkets.

The family Hedge also likes to make its own food - you know, from ingredients - but we're finding that even that is beginning to get harder. The "home baking" section of our local store has shrunk over the last five years from a half aisle down to just under a quarter of that size, meaning that I can no longer choose from the same range of flours and sugars as once I could. It's not just that, either; I can no longer buy wholewheat pasta unless it's spaghetti, or brown rice unless it's in small packs. I feel as if my diet is being marginalized, its linear meterage squeezed out by more and more pre-packed, processed food. No doubt the supermarkets would claim that they're just providing what people want, but I have another view; the profit margin and sales volume on raw foodstuffs is lower than on processed food, and so the supermarkets don't want us to cook our own food any more. A developer friend tells me that the latest way to make money is to buy up apartments and replace the kitchen with a bedroom, so by and large it looks like we're doing what we're told.

I don't accept that this is a proposition that's viable in the longer term. Hell, I don't accept that it's viable now. It's hideously wasteful in terms of energy and packaging, and the food's generally slop. In our own drive to cut down on our reliance on the supermarkets we've removed meat, milk, fruit and vegetables from our list to buy there but our spend remains much higher than we'd like. They have knocked the stuffing out of the competition, so the only realistic alternatives on the high street are other supermarkets which are further away and the corner shop, which could not provide our whole shop even if we had that kind of money.



There may be an alternative, which is to set up a co-operative to buy in bulk, at trade prices, from a wholefoods wholesaler like SUMA. Suma, by the way, is a worker's co-operative so the profits they make are spread between all the employees rather than siphoned off to anonymous shareholders. As far as I know there is no model to set up a co-operative, but so far as I can see it would need someone to collate orders coming in from members and work out their bill, and then everyone would send in a cheque for their spend made direct to the wholesaler. If this works out to be a lot of aggro for the co-ordinator (presumably Rentman to start with), then it could be rotated or a membership fee introduced - but that's getting ahead of things a bit. I've put together a basket of produce that people might want to order (organic pasta, rice, cereals, that sort of thing) and priced Tesco Online against the co-operatives. Want to know how it went? Then read on!